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I have started reading Conscience of a Conservative over the last few days. It is a short book, 83 pages in all. I probably could have read it in a couple of hours had I wanted. However, it would have been a mistake. While I don’t agree with everything in the book (I will start doing some writing about some of the specifics over the next few days), what I like about what Goldwater writes is due to its thought provoking nature, which forces the reader to explores the rightness or wrongness of their positions on social issues.

Until then, Barry Goldwater can be summed up from this quote by Historian Rick Perlstein in his book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

“Think of Al Gore winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations — and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. He would lose in a landslide. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. But if the precedent of 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. And not many decades later, Republicans would have to proclaim softer versions of those positions to get taken seriously for their party’s nomination.”